


Class Theory Essay, or, More Ado About Narrative

by Opacifica



Series: Classpect Meta [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Class Theory, Contains Many Diagrams, Essays, Illustrated, Illustrated Extensively, Meta, More Aspect Theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:46:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26869882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opacifica/pseuds/Opacifica
Summary: How does the class system, in relation with the previously described aspect system, work as a tool for descriptive narrative analysis and construction? Great follow-up question!
Series: Classpect Meta [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960270
Comments: 22
Kudos: 100





	Class Theory Essay, or, More Ado About Narrative

**INTRODUCTION**

Since I last cannonballed into classpect analysis meta, I haven’t been twiddling my thumbs and doing nothing. I made a [fairly comprehensive class quiz](https://uquiz.com/FziI8l), as I vaguely threatened to do in the previous essay, based in this vaguely incomprehensible chart. As it turns out, it’s a lot harder to make a succinct, gimmicky class chart as opposed to an aspect chart, due to the lack of an easy symbolic shorthand other than writing out ‘Maid’, like some sort of ‘person’ who types ‘words’.

Source: @0pacifica on Twitter, which is me.

Once again, I have dug myself a tidy explanation-hole by way of tossing out a ton of words and images and quiz links and one Google doc, all of which demand accounting-for, and furnishing very little of it. My intention with this essay isn't _just_ to pile helpful explanation-words on with a shovel.

‘Class’ is part of the underlying system that guided the writing of Homestuck, and it’s a system made explicit in the text, referenced in-work, occasionally expounded on by the characters themselves. There are a number of Explicitly Discussed Systems in Homestuck - the hemospectrum, the system of ancestral signs, aspect, echeladder, quadrants, the dream bubbles, all of these are Directly Understood By The Characters Themselves to influence both them and the dynamics of the universe they inhabit. In some cases, that universe is some part of Homestuck, like Alternian society, or else Homestuck itself; in other cases, it is Skaia-within-Homestuck imposing the Rules.

Class ‘occurs’ within Skaia as a game construct, but is also employed as a storytelling device more broadly in Homestuck. On one level, we have to look at class as an imaginary game construct for an imaginary game; on another level, we have to look at class as a very real literary construct for a very real work of literature that we are capable of holding in our hands, that we, as fanartists and fanwriters, can use as a device in our own narratives in a number of useful ways.

But yes. I want to talk about class, and not _just_ the sub-clade to ‘phylum’ in the taxonomic hierarchy. Or Marx, I guess, that’s also class, but not really this sort. What’s the point of class, anyway, when aspect is already such a powerful and useful symbolic lexicon for thinking about narrative role and narrative itself?

**A DISCLAIMER**

I may appear to be disregarding most existing systematizing of classes, most notably the passive-active binary. I appear to be doing this because I am doing this.

Most characters in Homestuck who talk about class, theirs’ or others’, are using Calliope’s words as best they can to describe their own experiences. And Calliope just… isn’t presented as an absolute objective authority on this stuff, at all. She actively undermines her own expository credibility, in the text, most explicitly here on [Page 5109](https://www.homestuck.com/story/5109). The only textual evidence of gendered classes comes from Calliope; if the ‘person from strict, binarist, clown-raised upbringing, demonstrated to have trouble understanding things beyond her own perspective’ source doesn’t raise enough red flags re: ‘there are two genders and they apply deterministically to class’, Andrew Hussie also explicitly contradicted Calliope’s explanation in a tweet. Women can be Princes.

I have, in general, very little regard for the Word Of God, especially when God’s Words are contradictory, and that’s why I’m so quick to dismiss the passive-active binaristic system as Cherubic Overengineering of a much more malleable set of game constructs. If Heirs are the active versions of Maids, and Maids are the active-creator versions of Bards, and Heirs are actually the passive version of Witches, which are slightly less active than Maids, then _who’s flying the plane_? Seriously, even if you do deeply, deeply care about Andrew Hussie’s contradictory explanations of classpect, the fact that they _are_ so contradictory, that he deliberately leaves them open-ended and alters his own approach as it evolves, sure does make it seem like passive-active binarism was not the Guiding Star System of Homestuck, or even one of them - more incidental to the process of Applying aspect to the text.

**ASPECT AND CLASS: PUTTING A FINER POINT ON THE RELATIONSHIP**

As I thoroughly belabored in the previous essay in this series, ‘the aspect system’, at least as I recognize it for this sort of analysis, is a grand compositional schema of narrative. A story has a material-existence and a meaning-existence, and each aspect, or its inverse (Light vs. Void, Time vs. Space) has a role in defining how that story will exist (the material continuum) and what it will mean when it does (the meaning continuum). Each aspect is defined by its relationship with another aspect; Light and Void, Time and Space. I recommend skipping back and reading the first essay if this is sounding like nonsense.

Characters, as well, are ‘aspect’-bound, their aspect affiliation representing a particularly strong, definitive relationship with one aspect over all the others. Each character, of course, existing in a multifaceted narrative, has _some_ relationship with every aspect. A Light player must, to some degree, in being a Light player, reject or forcibly redefine their allegiance to Void, which makes the ‘other end’ of the equilibrium often as definitive as the end with which they wind up narratively-aligned. That’s not as much the case with aspects outside of each equilibrious pair; one can align with Doom without that having much _inherent_ bearing on their relationship with Heart, for instance.

I wrote in these sorts of broad strokes in the past essay because I don’t like to try to use a system I haven’t fully defined and poked at for a few months until I feel I have a fairly comprehensive understanding of how it all pieces together. But things are about to get a lot more complicated than just ‘Light affiliate’. There are a lot of ways of affiliating with Light, after all. Twelve I’ll discuss here.

Class is a modulator of two levels of narrative positioning: ‘aspect-character relationship’ and the character-narrative relationship.

As far as aspect relationship goes, you might expect a Light player to interact with Light a certain way, without knowing their class, based on a set of common roles and attributes of Light players (we see three of them, and they talk a lot, which gives us a lot to work with). Class modulates those expectations because it acts as an intermediary between player and aspect; a Prince of Light and a Rogue of Light, based on what we can even vaguely read out of Homestuck, should have very different relationships with Light, despite its overwhelming importance in each of their stories.

At the same time, though, class also has a secondary effect. It also has an independent relationship with narrative, outside of its direct entanglement with aspect. Being a Prince may have different effects on player capacity _relative to aspect_ , but it also has a fairly absolute set of effects _relative to the story_ and to the character’s general story-role. The Disciple and Sollux have general narrative roles in common despite having a Mage-ly relationship with different aspects.

That’s the primary distinction that I want to draw - the ‘point’ I want to ‘refine’. Aspect has a role in story. So does the character/player. The player serves their aspect, but also their own interests, and these are two different, though not entirely distinct, ways of relating to the narrative.

Skaia is an organism, and so is the player. Two creatures, with a relationship that is generally, but not exclusively, intermediated by aspect. That ‘relationship’ is what is being described by class.

My relationship with the institution that employs me is generally intermediated by the work I’m contracted to perform. I send my supervisor graphs and conclusions, he looks at the graphs and conclusions and my performance is assessed that way. Sometimes, however, I interact with other components of the institution much more directly, without that intermediary.

The work is _important_ , it’s what I’m there to do, it’s definitive of my position in the narrative of ‘working for this particular lab’. But it’s not the only component of the story, because when it comes down to it, my lab and I are two disparate entities with disparate goals. My lab wants to produce high-quality papers, fulfill contracts, and avoid costly errors. I want to eat a sandwich, occasionally, and avoid contracting a virulent and deadly pneumonia, and sleep a few hours a night, and feel good about my work, and have enough spare time to write essays about Homestuck on the internet for no discernible reason, which no one has, at any point, asked me to do. My personal desires and ambitions are definitely influenced by the same factors that fomented this relationship in the first place, but they also sometimes interfere with or advance my lab’s objectives, depending on whether our goals (such as fulfilling and meaningful work!) align.

The aspect relationship is important, it’s the task, the ‘mission’, a reflection of what drives the character through the story. But while it exerts a massive influence on the player character, it is not all there is, and it plays a meaningful but not absolute role in the larger-scale relationship between the player and the story they inhabit. Put simply, not all Mages of Light are the same, because the minutiae of the aspect-relationship differ, and not all Princes of Life, even the same character recast in different stories, are going to have the same narrative outcome, because the _character relationship with the story differs_ , because the story is made of a different setting, different events, different other characters jostling for their own wants and interests. We see this most abundantly in the distinction between the Beforus ancestors and the Dancestors; Aranea and Mindfang, despite being ostensibly the same entity, are simply not the same character, and do not have identical relationships with narrative, though they can easily be interpreted as having a very similar relationship with Light. A _Sylph-like_ relationship, as we’ll get into later.

Pivotally, in Homestuck, the sandbox from which I’m extracting these concepts and systems, _Skaia always wins_.

When Skaia doesn’t win, the narrative resets completely and dissipates into obscurity. The game is played by Skaia’s rules, and Skaia can’t lose. The narrative evolves specifically so that Skaia can make more Skaia, with all necessary meaning-functions and material-functions fulfilled in that process.

So Skaia is our model organism, its steady march towards reproductive success our true north, and what we’re looking at in any function is fairly straightforward. How does Skaia symbiotically benefit from the association with the player organism, as a vehicle for its propagation? _Skaia always wins_ , but not every player loses. There’s more than one kind of symbiotic relationship, after all.

Let’s start there.

**SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP STRUCTURE: TWO ORGANISMS, PLAYER AND SKAIA**

Conceptually, ‘symbiosis’, as a word, comes from the Greek ‘ _symbioun_ ’: to live together, as with a companion. We typically understand symbiosis as mutually beneficial. Otherwise, why would the relationship continue? But sometimes, symbiotic relationships are unequal, and can disproportionately benefit one organism or even actively harm one of the ‘companions’.

Mutualism is a reciprocally beneficial symbiosis. Both species have their interests served. Ants on an acacia tree have a well-protected home, with delicious deposits of nectar on which to feed, in which their colonies can flourish, and in turn, they protect the tree from grazing herbivores and other, more harmful insect occupants. Both parties ultimately have their interests advanced, despite the fact that they’re not necessarily in alignment; it’s not as though the ants have any independent desire to fight off hungry ungulates, and it’s not as though the acacia tree sets out with a life’s mission to feed ants. This system has _evolved_ because it works really, really well.

Commensalism is more complicated. The evolutionary pressure is far more one-sided, because one species benefits, while the other receives mixed benefit with some clear detriments, or sometimes no absolute advantage at all. A treefrog living in the canopy of a tree makes abundant use of its companion for shelter, the facilitation of reproduction, and the attraction of delicious insects. It doesn’t have a tremendously negative impact on the host tree; it damages leaves when it lays eggs, it eats pollinators, but overall, it’s the treefrog that benefits, and the tree is more or less neutrally affected by the association. The system has evolved because it works really, really well for the frogs, and it doesn’t harm the trees enough to privilege phenotypic changes that would deter treefrog infestations.

Parasitism is even _more_ complex, in some ways, because it isn’t just a rote predator-prey relationship. It’s a long-term scenario in which two species are companions, in some way, that disproportionately benefits one and harms the other. Parasitic copepods, like _Pandarus rhincodonicus_ , are a good example of this, to keep up the theme of ‘creature inhabiting a creature’ as our symbiosis-example model. They attach to areas of their host organism, the whale shark, in which the skin is permeable, particularly wounds or previously parasitized locations, the gums, weak places in the skin. This provides the copepod with a home, as they are very firmly anchored; nourishment, as the shark feeds and they extract blood and tissue from the shark; and reproductive opportunities with other parasitic copepods of the same species. The shark suffers; its hydrodynamic movement and search for food is disadvantaged by the clinging parasites, its wounds remain open and don’t heal, it’s highly vulnerable to infections and other parasites, the more it’s slowed, the more difficult it becomes for a shark that respirates through ram ventilation to breathe. The system has evolved because the benefit to the copepods is massive, and they’ve successfully exploited the very evolutionary weaknesses that make a whale shark a whale shark. It’s huge, not flexible, not especially communal, an open-ocean shark that doesn’t always have attendant mutualist or commensalist fish around to nibble the parasites off before they get a real stranglehold on the real estate.

These three designations also happen to very neatly describe different ways that different classes interact with Skaia. As I said before, Skaia always wins; the system evolves on Skaia’s terms, in its service. Skaia is the ant defending the tree, or the treefrog mostly just hanging out, or the parasite on the damaged fin of the shark.

The host-occupant model works especially well when you consider that the story _is_ the characters - it’s told through their words and their images and their decisions. While one can certainly conceptualize Skaia as the whale in whose belly the story is told, the reciprocal is perhaps even more accurate. Skaia is produced, housed, and sustained by the characters; as a baseline, they _exist_ outside of SBURB/SGRUB, in Homestuck, and they become Skaia’s host upon entry; they have to choose to run the program on their respective devices, or Skaia can’t occupy them at all.

The Beta kids are not textually classpected before entering Skaia, though the Alpha kids effectively are, because they’re entering the Skaia-level story already inhabited by their Beta-version forebears.

Alright, with that said: what does it mean to have a mutualist, commensalist, or parasitic relationship with Skaia?

In the simplest possible terms, Thieves, Rogues, Heirs, and Knights, as they follow their personal goals, simultaneously achieve story-goals. Their personal narratives twine with the overarching narrative. Skaia is the ant on the tree, feeding on the delicious nectar of their trials and tribulations and personal development and fending off herbivores and rival insects that might hinder them on their path, cutting down narratives in which they founder as ‘untrue’. Their relationship with narrative is mutualist; more often than not, their ‘arcs’ are the ones that carry the ‘true story’, the one that culminates in Skaia’s completed reproductive cycle, forward.

Not every Thief/Rogue/Heir/Knight is Skaia’s Chosen One, but look at the session leaders of our sample size of four.

Karkat, our Knight of Blood, is responsible for doing the impossible - moderating the relationships of twelve frustrated, heavily armed children to the point that they don’t murder each other (the doomed timelines/dream bubbles are littered with god tiered trolls, suggesting that this is a hallmark of total-failure-state timelines) to the point that all necessary causality-fulfillment can occur through the complete cast of trolls’ interactions with the humans. If Eridan is god tiered, the story isn’t Homestuck; if Kanaya is just straight-up dead before she gets the chance to talk to Rose, the story isn’t Homestuck. Karkat, in this regard, is a wildly successful leader, despite the narrative horrors he facilitates by Making Homestuck Possible.

His goal is to keep all of his friends alive, and he achieves this, to the point that Skaia shifts gears to a different session’s prioritization. The troll’s session is DEFINED by Blood - by their relationships, past, history with each other, as emphasized by the amount of time we spend dwelling on the minutiae of their preteen dramas, traumas, and, in fairly harrowing detail, the ways they’ve hurt each other and tried to mend that hurt, before we even chronologically enter the session. This is the purview of Blood; Karkat is the Knight of Blood; Karkat is the leader, and Skaia’s assigned Hero, of the beta trolls’ session.

When the beta session kicks in, John, our Heir of Breath, is very explicitly the leader of the beta session and its Skaia assigned Hero. Literally, John is the only member of the beta session with a chronologic continuity of self across the Game Over reset point; Terezi counsels, Rose counsels, and John acts to advance the session. The beta session’s role in overall narrative advancement, as well as its internal dynamic, is DEFINED by Breath, by disconnection from the past and relentless forward motion occurring largely disconnected from rules and norms. The victory achieved through the betas’ ongoing narrative is one that occurs through retcons and guile and reinvention and deliberate disconnection from Skaia’s meaning-making system (which is splintering under the destructive influence of Lord English, NECESSITATING this approach) which has already been demonstrated not to reward the opposite approach in the case of the trolls.

The beta session isn’t about dwelling on the past - it’s about the senseless, ultraviolent massacre of the past, Mom and Dad and Bro, the past/convention/familiarity as an explicit _threat_ through Bec, and the session growing forward from a brutal, abrupt disconnect with traditional familial meaning-making. This is the purview of Breath; John is the Heir of Breath; John is the leader, and Skaia’s assigned Hero, of the beta kids’ session.

Roxy, our Rogue of Void, is described by Dirk to have been the 'true leader' of the alpha session. This is a rare occasion in which Dirk says something correct, and is, in my view, validated by the session's dynamics. The alpha session is defined by its stasis, by the relative lack of interaction and story growth happening, by how little we actually see of what happens in their ‘session’ despite the massive length of time over which it occurs relative to the other sessions. If it were a Lifey session, we would dwell on story growth to the point of being kind of unnecessary; if it were a Hopey session, it would linger on creation, radical new directions, plot tumors given disproportionate attention that delay the story’s momentum; if it were a Hearty session, it would actually explore the interpersonal dynamics at work, Dirk and Jake might actually have a conversation, we wouldn’t just see the people involved at their stressed-out-conflict-est, we’d dig into those relationships and what they say about the people involved and the text would draw conclusions about it. None of that happens.

Their session is overwhelmingly uneventful, at least in terms of what we’re actually shown in, effectively, one flash. While the Bloody session of the beta trolls dwells on the past rather than the session itself, and the Breathy session of the beta kids dwells on the newness and forward-progress and sometimes horrible re-making and re-evaluation of meaning by its players, the Voidy session of the alpha kids dwells on… nothing, really. Success for the alphas is just existing and not fucking up and murdering each other for long enough for the betas to show up. Failure state would be trickster-ing too early, anyone involved dying, anyone involved avoiding the trickster debacle and not ending up on their dream moon to die. All of these moments of conflagration had to be kept from happening. Conflict had to be mitigated and minimized until it boiled over at the right time. This is the purview of Void; Roxy is the Rogue of Void; Roxy is the leader, and Skaia’s assigned Hero, of the alpha kids’ session.

Finally, Meenah, our Thief of Life, is ultimately the conductive force that puts the dancestors in the dream bubbles, an outcome that is necessary to facilitate their contribution to the progression of the alpha ‘true’ narrative. We aren’t privy to much of what went down in that session; their session itself simply isn’t centered the way the other three are, and our only interactions with the alpha trolls session occur as a result of their stubborn, relentless clinging to Life in the dream bubbles, which are themselves a creation fueled and shaped by Life. Rather than relevance, Meenah sinks her nails into sheer textual _existence_ and successfully holds on; it’s not overwhelmingly relevant or especially meaningful that she high-fives Dirk, for instance, but… there she is, doing that, existing, in the panel, in Homestuck. The significance of the dancestors is overwhelmingly owed to just The Fact That They Are There, and Meenah, in Openbound, is the literal perspective through which they are brought into the story, not to advance it, but merely to facilitate its growth and expansion along with the continual growth and expansion of Homestuck itself. This is the purview of Life; Meenah is the Thief of Life; Meenah is the leader, and Skaia’s assigned Hero, of the alpha trolls’ session.

With all that said: what about the other Skaian mutualists in a position to emerge as heroes, who nonetheless are not the leaders of their sessions - Dave, Nepeta, Equius? More importantly, what about Vriska?

Well, Equius is one of two formalistically classpected constituent components of Lord English. Davepetasprite^2 is the hero destined to vanquish him. These heroic - or at least grand, and in keeping with his personal desire to be subjugated by Gamzee - destinies lie within the larger narrative, fueling Skaia’s momentum towards the Victory State, though not in the specific context of their sessions’ subnarratives. While each session is defined by an aspect reflected in its leader, the broader Skaian narrative is larger than any one session, and larger even than a simple conglomerate of four. Dave, Nepeta, and Equius all do have grand and heroic destinies, in keeping with their objectives - ‘being an unambiguous goodguy hero who brings the story to a conclusion’, ‘placating Equius and keeping the personal interests of the team balanced out’, ‘sublimating but covertly indulging personal desires for both submission and domination as part of a grand, incomprehensible Story’ - actively cultivated and narratively centered by Skaia. Dave is the story-ender; he _literally_ gets the last word. Equius and Nepeta both serve vital meaning-making functions to narrative that are compatible with their objectives.

So how about Vriska? I’ll get into this a little more when I talk about Thieves specifically, but Homestuck is itself about meaning in conflict with story, and the triumph of sprawling meaning-making over a narrative desperate to end. This is the purview of Light; Vriska is the Thief of Light; Vriska is the leader, and Skaia’s assigned Hero, of Homestuck.

On the other hand, Seers, Mages, Maids, and Sylphs are not exactly assigned protagonist at birth, despite the _capacity_ to be every bit as heroic or villainous as their counterparts - they’re still people, after all. Their relationship with the Skaian narrative, however, is markedly different. It doesn’t bend to accommodate them or to harm them. Like the treefrog and the host tree, while the slights and disadvantages can add up, what they get out of their personal narrative is what they make of it, and their journey must be intrinsically motivated or they’ll inevitably face disappointment. Skaia makes use of them, but its use is neither exculpatory nor especially rewarding.

At worst, they’re furniture, fixtures rather than dynamic forces - Terezi furnishes a bloody scarf and dies, Rose’s principal narrative ‘utility’ is in counseling her session-mates, for good or ill, and she creates a doomed timeline when she jets off on her own to fight Bec Noir, Aradia flits about in fulfillment of narrative causality, a framing device rather than a grand, dramatic mission that we follow as heroics on her part, Sollux propels the meteor and politely fucks off so Davekat can happen, Aranea spends millennia stewing in resentment over her lack-of-role in her session (Light players in particular, as I’ll get into later, suffer deeply in commensalistic relationships with narrative), attempts to take on the mantle of villain, and is promptly and brutally shot down. At best, they may temporarily rise above or fall below their narrative positioning to apply some vector of force to the narrative, though never without consequences and often without a drastic ‘effect’ of their own - the heroics and/or villain-ics must be performed by someone else. Kanaya empowers both Karkat and Eridan, Terezi empowers Vriska and John, Jane empowers everybody (note that her healing power does not work on herself, like Wolverine; she furnishes it to others and must be healed by an alternate version of herself when she dies in Collide), as do Aradia and Sollux, Rose empowers Dave and Roxy…

In each case, the narrative advancement that the commensalist - the Seer, Mage, Maid, or Sylph - facilitates is not their own, but is distributed disproportionately to the ‘heroes’ of their story. The narrative isn’t operating against them or to harm them, but what it never does is _center_ them.

When they fall out of step with the narrative’s trajectory towards The Victory State, they’re likely to be smacked into line, literally in the form of a doomed timeline, death, or otherwise egregious emotional consequences as a result of ‘failed action’ a la Rose, Terezi, Kanaya, etc, but if they’re willing to work within it, they have full ownership of their own suffering as well as their victories, which is hardly meaningless.

This is not to call Skaian commensalists inherently “passive” by any means - some of them take on their role quite actively, and wield and change their aspect’s instantiation in the narrative profoundly in the process. But it’s undeniable that they are ‘assigned’ support player roles rather than spotlight-grabbing heroics, as instantiated in their treatment by narrative.

Finally, Bards, Witches, Pages, and Princes are being ‘put into their place’ by the narrative throughout their participation in it, and it’s not an especially fun place to be put in, either. Their desires and Skaia’s ends are fundamentally incompatible. The incongruity there, the frustrated distance between where they want to be and where the story inevitably places them, fuels the potential of these classes to do great things, but rarely to their own benefit. With Skaia in a parasitic position of sapping the meaning from their stories and their progress, they rarely have the chance to self-actualize or find contentment. That’s simply not what the Skaian narrative is about. They’re the tools and the architecture of the story rather than the heroes, and while there can be dignity in that, there isn’t always.

Where Skaian commensalists can find themselves props or furniture for a story that isn’t fundamentally _about_ them, those on the receiving end of Skaia’s parasitism are treated with what must seem to them like _antipathy_ at the hands of fate. While mutualists’ struggles and evolution are elevated and valorized and commensalists are sidelined, the struggles of those Skaia parasitizes are grist for the mill. Their suffering _is_ the story, not the triumph at the end of it. There isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel or a pot of gold at the end of the character arc.

Jade’s pursuit of a home and a place to belong among friends - how does that go for her? Her ‘arc’, as it were, is not about palliating, healing, or growing through that desire; it’s about wallowing in that unmet need, because it’s what fuels her to participate in the ‘right’ version of the narrative, the one that ends in the victory state. The narrative works because Jade is sad and lonely and convinced that, if she could just bend the fabric of space itself the right way, move the story in the right direction, fulfill its conditions, she could have the things she believes are waiting for her. If she just works hard enough, serves faithfully enough.

Dirk wants to understand himself, and be the best version of himself - not a hero, not a villain, but someone his friends and family can love and understand for what he actually is rather than what they believe of him. Does his heroic sacrifice really represent the culmination of that arc, or is it about Dave’s story? Does anything change about the way his friends view him, by the end of Homestuck? No. Not really. He’s heroically sacrificed himself _multiple_ times before; that isn’t growth for him, that isn’t a change in habits for him, it’s narratively enforced self-harm.

Jake is Jake. His trajectory through the game is one of growing progressively more cowed by fate and by his friends, shoehorned into a role because he refuses to pick one he sincerely wants. If his goal is heroism, well, how heroic was the fight with the Felt, really, relative to the arc-significant or just plain significant battles of the other kids? If his goal was to self-actualize, well… he doesn’t. He ventures out of his comfort zone, is punished by the story for having done so, and retreats back into it immediately.

Eridan makes the same mistakes in terms of self-deluding belief over and over until he dies ignobly and, in the ‘true’ timeline, is one of the few trolls never even incrementally ‘revived’ as a sprite. Our virtual only point of narrative access to Feferi is when she is experiencing relationship troubles, getting murdered, or both - and we certainly never see her grow or change as a result of it. Tavros undergoes a veritable humiliation conga at the hands of the narrative, and his forays at growth through believing in himself and becoming something different are immediately undercut, his accomplishments grist for Meenah and Vriska’s mill, as he… retreats, invariably, back into his comfort zone. Some class themes cropping up here, huh? Gamzee, our only Bard, gets molded into a tool for his aspect and the narrative itself, entirely forgoing any character development whatsoever in favor of putting in a long term of service as deus ex machina to keep the plot on the rails and rationalize the unrationalizable.

To have a parasitic relationship with Skaia is to be its glutton for punishment, to move the story forward _at the expense of the character’s personal desires_ and also at the expense of their personal narrative development.

So, to recap: a mutualist relationship with Skaia means the character/class in general serves their own interests as well as the narrative’s interests, a commensalistic relationship with Skaia means the character/class in general serves the interests of others within the narrative, and a parasitic relationship with Skaia means the character/class in general serves the narrative’s interests at the expense of their own interests.

...alright.

This mutualism/commensalism/parasitism trichotomy is fundamental to the broader ‘character-narrative’ relationship, but is also determinative of the more granular ‘character-aspect’ relationship, once we start thinking about the different ways that a character and their aspect can constructively interact for Skaia’s benefit.

Let’s bring back that chart for a second. We’ve talked about the y-axis on the left. As part of a composite picture of what it means to be any given ‘class’, the y-axis, which is the axis of symbiosis - to sum up the last few thousand words - tells us whether a character of a certain class:

[Mutualism]: is narratively positioned for their personal advancement, or;  
[Commensalism]: is narratively positioned for the advancement of others in the narrative, or;  
[Parasitism]: is narratively positioned to their detriment

But of course, we spend a lot more time, as a fandom, talking about the more visible and textually discussed axis: the axes of manipulation and manifestation. How characters relate to their aspect _within_ the confines of the Skaian narrative.

The framework I use, here, to best describe the way the breakdown works within Homestuck, is that of ‘aspect change’ vs. ‘aspect use’. So let’s hop to it.

**MANIPULATION VS. MANIFESTATION OF ASPECT IN THE SKAIAN NARRATIVE:**  
**LIKES CHARGE, REBLOGS CAST**

There are four great words, if I do say so myself, on that graphic I made - remember the graphic, Jane? I remember the graphic. Four words that end in -ant or -ent. I will invite you, here, to imagine how fucking gleeful and self-congratulatory I was when I came up with those. Remember, you’re reading a generously edited version of my internal monologue, here; inside of my head it’s _much_ worse.

Student, alterant, agent, and operant. What do I mean by that?

Every player character is a steward of their aspect in the narrative they inhabit. Aspect, as well, is present in the narrative structure as a continuum; it’s endemic to Skaia. To make a narrative something dynamic rather than static, aspect can’t just passively exist as it always is and always has been. There are two principal ways that aspect and player interact in the service of narrative development: one changes the other, or one uses the other.

I mention the old ‘likes charge, reblogs cast’ stock phrase because it’s a helpful way of thinking about it. Players who change or are changed by their aspect are responsible for transformations in the overall aspect dynamic of the story: what it’s used for, what it means, how it factors into the story and is understood. Players who use or are used by their aspect manifest it as it already is, with much less transformational power and a less personal relationship with their aspect, but with greater utility to whatever interests they serve.

Students of aspect are changed by it; aspect acts transformationally on narrative _through_ changing this character and forcing a reinterpretation of their role and position.

Alterants of aspect change it; they transform the way that their aspect acts on narrative _through_ their seeming will and agency, bending the allegedly immutable ‘rules’ of aspect.

Agents of aspect are used by it; they manifest their aspect as it already is, a person-shaped aspect stew sloshing their way through the narrative with everything they do, spilling it as they go.

Operants of aspect make use of it; they wield their aspect as their will and agency demand, as a tool to get from one place to another, though this limits their ability to understand it.

I recognize that this is a big systematic claim, a fresh set of explanation-holes to shovel examples and justification into. So let’s go.

**CHANGING AXIS: STUDENTS AND ALTERANTS**

What does it mean to change an aspect? I got into the ‘essential definitions of aspect’ in the last essay, but we can go deeper than that. Doom can be conventionally understood, just, like, as a word and a concept, to signify an inevitable fate, and typically not a pretty one. Words have conventionally recognized meanings, even if these meanings are very contextually mutable.

A person can change a meaning by personalizing it, changing the context - what Doom as a concept means to you. Your inevitable fate, and your cognizance of it, can inspire you to do great things, to evade your destiny or else to inadvertently cement it, finding your fate on the path you took to avoid it rather than taking it at face value. Once personalized, understood, and ‘applied’, Doom isn’t just an abstract concept anymore.

A person can also change a meaning by doing something different and novel with the concept. Saying ‘actually, an inevitable fate could be reimagined into something useful, if you think about it. The ‘inevitable fate’ of Doom could just be ‘about’ clipping through the story like a Legend of Zelda speedrunner to achieve your goals faster, it doesn’t have to be dire and foreboding, sometimes achieving a prescribed fate and destiny is desirable, when the alternative is, say, dying first and never reaching it, or burning out as a kid and never making anything of yourself, and that’s what Doom could mean here’.

Either way, Doom is no longer the sum of its dictionary definition and general perception. In one case, it’s transformed through association with a subject, channeled through their understanding and purposes, not exactly into a tool, but into something novel, into what they understand it to be and what it makes of them. In the other case, it’s being understood as an external force, and the concept-ore has been mined out of the ether and forged into something useful. From a lump of rock to a set of decent silverware or a beautiful sculpture or an engine part you were missing.

That’s fundamentally not the same thing as ‘using’ an aspect, and in both cases, it describes a specific and consistent type of relationship-to-aspect that we see in Homestuck. To have a changing-type relationship with an aspect requires, as the price of entry, a much more intimate understanding of that aspect. The blacksmith who forges a sword understands it very differently than the knight who wields it, and while there’s a level of insight to using, to be sure, the level of comprehension required to transmute something into something else, in any sort of organized way, is substantial and requires a great deal of personal investment in aspect-meaning.

So let’s go a little deeper, ourselves, into these aspect-player relationships and also dig into how they fit into the arduously described narrative-player relationship strata from earlier.

**SUBHEADING: STUDENTS OF ASPECT (THIEVES, SEERS, BARDS)**

Right-o. Under the framework I’ve thus far laid out, we recognize that Thieves are advanced through narrative, Seers advance others within the narrative, and Bards advance the narrative at their own expense.

For a student of aspect to be _advanced_ by their narrative position, their relationship with their aspect must, in some way, serve their personal objectives. This doesn’t mean that the effect of their aspect is an Absolute Game-Breaking Benefit: Meenah, a student of Life, who benefits from her narrative positioning as a Thief, still _dies_. Being a Thief (or any class in a position of narrative benefit) is not _sufficient_ to achieve a desired end state, but it does _help_.

Specifically, a Thief’s relationship with narrative, as it is mitigated by their aspect, is of net advancement to them, when it comes to achieving their goals. Meenah, once she made up her mind to use the tumor to blow up her session, preserving Life at the expense of life with a lower-case l, succeeds at this. For a Thief, this typically entails Acquiring aspect-related benefits and capabilities for oneself, a pretty literal interpretation of the ‘Thief’ label that plays out in practice. Endgame-timeline Vriska’s narrative advancement is undoubtedly enriched by her acquisition of Light (significance, meaning, the subjectively correct answers to the important questions) on her path handholding the narrative to a victory state. Her relationship with Light ultimately serves her just as well in the parallel Game Over-verse, as, once she settles on a desirable goal - growth, healing, personal development - the enrichment of her acquisition of Light similarly advances her to the outcome she desires, and the narrative bends and stretches to accommodate her victorious moment of Terezi handholding and forgiveness.

Mutualistic aspect relationships aren’t conveyor belts leading the players involved to Good Outcomes regardless of their desires; in a Thief’s case, for instances, their aspect relationship can be better understood as a means by which they are shaped and changed into an instrument capable of realizing their desires, which are also the narrative’s ends. They are cultivated as the hero the narrative needs. This is a heady connection to have to one’s aspect; is it any wonder that a common observation of Thieves is that they are self-important? A less common, but more important observation in understanding Thieves is that they have _reason_ to be self-important, that the narrative tends to validate their self-importance, and that identifying a Thief by personality is not as easy as pointing at a person who is behaving egocentrically.

A student relationship with aspect is a deeply personal and intimate thing, and students’ relationships with their aspects tend to look a lot like their relationships with themselves; they consume their aspect, digest it, and assimilate it into their sense of self. A Thief, thus, is fed a steady narrative diet of their own importance and their own validation as an actor via their aspect.

A Seer, on the other hand, is like a Thief, minus the validation of the superiority complex. A Seer’s relationship with their aspect feels real and important and personally transformative, but they aren’t being set up for heroic success the same way a Thief is being positioned to personally benefit through their aspect. There’s a very real frustration to the sense that one should have some sort of heroic purpose, but not being able to actualize that without literally invoking a doomed timeline. This is something we see in both Rose and Terezi - a level of deep resentment of the very aspect that has made them who and what they are. A Seer, as a commensalist, is ‘set up’ to facilitate the advancement and empowerment of others, to be a bridge from point A to point B, but not necessarily to ever see a point B for _themselves_ , unless they make it up on their own.

If Thieves self-advance via their own evolution-through-aspect, Seers predominantly advance others within the narrative through their evolution-through-aspect. A Thief acquires self-knowledge and self-benefitting knowledge as a function of their aspect. A Seer acquires knowledge-of-aspect, certainly, which may or may not have much of a benefit to them, but which certainly benefits _someone_ in the quest for the victory state.

In Rose’s case, this is predominantly Dave, John, and Roxy. In Terezi’s case, this is predominantly Vriska and John. In all cases, the primary beneficiaries of Seer’s personal digestion and comprehension as students of aspect are mutualists, the heroes of the story. For all a Seer’s insight and brilliance, they aren’t spoon-fed the _benefit_ of that insight and brilliance the way a Thief is, they have to scrabble for it, and this can be a very punishing thing for the Seer, and ultimately detrimental to their relationship with their aspect.

As for Bards, following this logic, they advance and empower the narrative through their evolution-through-aspect, and with a sample size of one exceptionally plot-relevant Bard, our friend Gamzee Makara… yes. Gamzee changes drastically, not over the course of the narrative, but through the instant, cutting revelation that he was a character in a story. His sobriety - sobriety, here, brought on by this awareness of his own fate, and the grand fates of others, all intertwined - brings about a drastic change. He learns his lessons at the knee of Rage, and like any student, he goes on to implement them as the story demands.

In the case of a Bard, the instruction and change administered by their aspect is not positive, self-empowering change at all. Bards are graduates of the school of hard knocks, largely at the hands of their own aspect. This isn’t to say that All Bards Are Like Gamzee - not even all Bards of Rage are like Gamzee. But Rage is an especially potent and volatile teacher, and the lessons that a Bard learns are often violent and desperately unpleasant ones about their position in the world. It’s no wonder that Bards are conventionally understood to be shaped into vehicles of destruction; their aspect relationship is often devastating to their sense of identity and belief, and while this doesn’t make a Bard evil, it does give them the potential to facilitate terrible things.

After all, it happened to them, and they survived it, in one way or another. Maybe it even made them stronger, knowing what they know, experiencing what they experienced. If the rest of the world can’t handle it, that sounds like a ‘them’ problem.

**SUBHEADING: ALTERANTS OF ASPECT (ROGUES, MAGES, WITCHES)**

So, students are changed by their aspect. Alterants, on the other hand, _enact_ change in their aspect. As I mentioned earlier, aspects exist as a baseline, Hope is a thing that exists as itself, as both a concept and as a word with a meaning, and not an unimportant one, even if you don’t have a Hope player around. Through evolution and creative reinterpretation, though, words can come to mean different things, and be repurposed for different objectives, especially in a closed system like Skaia.

Let’s talk about Roxy, and let’s talk, specifically, about Roxy’s relationship with Void, which is so different from, say, Equius’ relationship with Void. Roxy’s transformation of Void - ‘stealing’ it - is very different, as well, when compared to a Thief’s acquisition of aspect. She’s not instructed by Void, she doesn’t learn from Void - she teaches Void to be something else (by deepening its connection to Space). The Matriorb is the most notable result of this alteration of Void, the fact that Roxy reframes ambiguity and nonexistence into a means to accomplish a decidedly contra-Voidy Spatial end.

When Roxy talks about Stealing Void, she’s describing the reappropriation of nonexistence, which is a ‘theft’ of nonexistence, in the sense that, if I steal a horse, I get to pick its name and braid its mane the way I think is pretty and it becomes my friend instead of someone else’s friend. Acquiring it ‘changes’ it, because it changes the rules surrounding it when I transmute _your_ horse into _my_ horse.

When a Thief acquires their aspect, in contrast, _they_ transmute from a non-horse-owner to a horse-owner, with all accompanying empowerments this entails. The determinative question is ‘where is the Focus of the change, the Point of the change’. Vriska evolves into a more powerful and textually validated version of herself; she doesn’t do a thing to change the Concept of Light in the narrative, except to be enriched by it.

A Rogue changes their aspect in a way that advances them in the narrative; a Mage changes their aspect in a way that advances others in the narrative; a Witch changes their aspect in a way that advances the narrative at their own expense.

Rogues, like Roxy and Nepeta, transmute their aspects, respectively Void and Heart, into forms that they can instantiate, act with, and use to solve problems. Roxy’s use of Void turns ‘the unanswerable question’ on its head; what doesn’t exist and isn’t understood is still real, if only as a shadow, and the shadow it casts from nonexistence can be as real as anything that exists. The matriorb, in its nonexistence, Matters, and its mattering can be made into matter by someone with insight into nonmattering and someone with insight into matter (Roxy and Callie, natch).

Nepeta, as well, transmutes identity into the codification of the system of quadranting, translating its importance to the text. She finds solace not in identity-as-it-is, but in identity-made-her-own. While she does ‘share’ this - Rogues do not hoard the benefit of Aspect Change the way Thieves do, and Aspect Change For The Better definitely rolls downhill to everyone who is interacting with the aspect in question - her purrposes and desires in escaping into this system are very much her own. She has a crush on Karkat; it’s sweet. Her greatest act of identity transmutation, however, is her realization of her ultimate self in the form of Davepeta, really the ultimate act of Becoming.

Mages. I swear, I didn’t just design this system with the intention of sticking Mages in wherever there was a little hole in the chart and ‘making it work’ rhetorically. Okay, maybe a little, at first. But not anymore. The most important ‘realization’ I had pertaining to Mages, I credit to a conversation with Julia, in which she noted that, when Jade propels the golden ship and Sollux propels the meteor, they’re fundamentally doing the same thing: not just channeling their aspect power, but altering it to serve as a very similar propulsive force through narrative rather than a static existential fact. Very much in service of Skaia’s interests, as this occurs in both cases in the ‘true’ timeline that culminates in the victory state; it is _necessary_ to get both the meteor and the golden battleship to where they’re going. But how?

Conventionally, one would not regard either Doom or Space as a potent Projectile Propelling Force. One might also scratch their head at the fact that both Sollux and Jade were their session’s ‘instigators’, but not leaders, and both were the last in their sessions to enter the medium, closing the loop. They both change the rules in ways that make their respective sessions work.

Incidentally, so do the other two Witches of note, The Handmaid and Feferi; one manipulates fate and leverages destiny to put Alternia as a gameboard into place, the other manipulates the story-growth and momentum of existence itself to keep ghosts in continuity within dream bubbles.

The consistency-but-difference between the Witch role and the Mage role was the big breakthrough, here.

Mages transmute their aspect into a usable form for the benefit of others within the narrative, but without direct benefit to themselves. Sollux transmutes Doom into a propulsive force that allows the meteor crew, himself not included, to continue on the path to their fate.

Witches transmute their aspect into a usable form for the benefit of the narrative, at their own expense. Jade moves the story forward, remaking the rules of space and story itself, leveraging walls and spatial power to put herself in place to keep the story developing, but in the ‘true’ timeline, this is immensely harmful and isolating to her. Jade doesn’t play Fateful Matchmaker for her friends, as Sollux does - she plays jailor for herself.

This is a consistent thread for Mages - The Disciple reinvents romantic relationships and the rigidly structured ‘rules’ of Alternian interpersonal paradigms with her quadrant-transcendent relationship with The Sufferer and her dissemination of his teachings through Alternian society.

It also holds true for Witches - The Handmaid inflicts discord and hatred as means to a terrible but narratively important end for the society, only to be thrown away to her own fate in combat with the Condesce. Feferi’s service to the narrative, the transmutation of life to an enduring post-life in the bubbles, comes part and parcel with her ignoble and ultimately permanent death. She creates her own prison. Witches are good at that.

**USING AXIS: AGENTS AND OPERANTS**

A deceptively easy question, here. What does it mean to use an aspect? Especially considering that aspects as abstract concepts are not the most eminently usable things, at face value. How do you use Hope, and particularly, given the context, how do you ‘use’ Hope without also ‘changing’ Hope?

Horribly enough, this is where I start wanting to use words like ‘active’ and ‘passive’, though given the interactions I’ve had on Twitter when making these posts, and my general deep skepticism of any interpretation of the text that doesn’t originate directly from the text, I’m _very_ careful with how I interact with that language. I’ll do a whole thing about it later, I promise, probably in the sum-up Hopey Bullshit section I budget words for at the end of my essays. Some people, I understand, call these ‘conclusions’, but that seems like an excessively flattering way to put it when talking about my work.

Things can be ‘used’ incidentally or deliberately. When I swing a bat at a baseball, I deliberately use the bat, but I incidentally use my biceps, my balance, my eye, my affinity for athletics or lack thereof. One is a tool; one is the embodiment, almost the abstraction of a tool. The self is an object, too, as is a bat. Physically, you are a thing, your brain is a thing, your memories and selfhood, while not reducible to a brain, are sketched out in your synapse pathways and the associations they prompt when activated as a constellation.

Someone who is used-by Hope may find that the use-value of Hope is incidental to their identity, their story-trajectory. It’s the muscle they find themselves using most, the approach they find themselves taking, the way they conceive of themself, the world, and all the meaning in it. Rather than being changed by this relationship, they come to embody their aspect as it already is, as a conduit between it and the narrative. An agent acts as the ambassador of their aspect in the medium.

On the other hand, for an aspect _user_ , Hope, or whatever aspect, may be the bludgeoning tool that allows them to get where they want to go. A user of Hope may find that the forces of belief and its attendant relationship with unchecked creation and limitless potential are _incredibly_ useful to them, though the efficacy, completeness, and satisfaction of this relationship is inevitably mitigated by their overall relationship with narrative. An operant employs their aspect to suit whatever ends they serve, and through this use disseminates their aspect in the medium.

**SUBHEADING: AGENTS OF ASPECT (HEIRS, MAIDS, PAGES)**

An agent of aspect has an affinity for that aspect; it is endemic to them. An Agent of Light, for instance, has an affinity for asking questions that have answers, evaluating those answers based on the evidence they can access, and drawing subjective conclusions that inform the way they exist and what they choose to do with their gift of time. Their problem-solving and the way they walk in the world are informed by their comfort with this way of understanding things, the fact that they readily rely on themselves to understand and parse meaning, the fact that Light, for them, as part of their identity, readily furnishes a path forward without much digging or reaching involved. This isn’t to say that these are Natural Genetic Gifts, but instead ways of describing identities that evolve over the time it takes for someone to mature into a person old enough to play SBURB/SGRUB.

Some people simply _are_ very ‘aspect’-y, for a whole host of reasons. These people tend to be agents.

Heir, Maid, and Page, just as words, all have implications of ‘becoming something’, and the formula here is fairly straightforward: coming to embody aspect as it advances the self within the narrative, coming to embody aspect as benefits others within the narrative, and coming to embody aspect as it benefits the narrative, but not the self.

An Heir has an affinity for their aspect, acting as a conduit for it in a way that serves both their own personal interests and those of narrative progression simultaneously. Equius has the ability to snap Gamzee’s spine like a toothpick; we have to understand that his decision not to act to prevent his death, and that of many others, was his personal choice as well as the Narrative Direction Required To Reach The Victory State. It was not ultimately a defeat for him; he died smiling.

Equius is benefitted by not asking questions or confronting ambiguity. His base state is comfort with and indulgence in the exigent hemocaste system. This willingness to turn a blind eye to contradictions consumes him; he loves Nepeta, but considers her lesser to himself, admires Aradia, but considers her _far_ lesser to himself, abhors Gamzee, but considers him a superior in all respects. An Heir of Void finds comfort in the status quo, and finds it easy to help maintain the status quo; leaving things unquestioned, unchallenged, out of the glare of the antiseptic sunlight, all of that in some way helps an Heir of Void accomplish their personal goals while simultaneously fueling the progression of the narrative they inhabit.

Breath is, of course, a very different aspect, and our other Heir case study, John, is a very different character in Homestuck, though with many commonalities in aspect and narrative relation. Breath is what isn’t yet, but could be, meaning yet to be discovered rather than mined from traditional sources. An Heir of Breath takes comfort in what isn’t, in the forward push, in moving on to the next thing, the new thing, the undiscovered thing rather than dwelling in the past.

For all classes used-by their aspect - Heirs succeeding through their aspect in more ways than one, Maids being Made of aspect, Pages being blank save for what their aspect writes on them - a very legitimate consequence to their aspect relationship can behis is different from students, who consume their aspect; for agents, the aspect consumes them.

Maids, for their part, come to embody their aspect in a way that benefits other narrative entities. Jane mends and restores life, Aradia mends and restores time, and neither of these aptitudes especially benefit them; Jane can’t revive herself, Aradia’s alternate selves die by hundreds of thousands, and she has some continuity of self with all of them that allows them to cooperate, in contrast with Dave’s discontinuity with Davesprite and other alt-timeline-selves. Rather than using time, Aradia is embodying time. Rather than using Life, Jane is embodying Life.

For each of them, how this extends to their circumstances rather than some inborn natural tendency is fairly clear. Under Alternian norms, Aradia was born to die, even outside of SGRUB’s predestination and Doc Scratch’s facilitative interference, and her choice to embrace the aesthetic as well as the philosophy of endings and to take what control and find what joy she could in them makes her a particularly exemplary example of a successful Maid. Meanwhile, Jane, a Maid of Life, was born into diametrically opposite circumstances, with all the momentum in the world propelling her towards greatness, ambition, the growth of her influence and reach. An heiress, she literally inherits Life, but she’s not an Heir; she fairly quickly starts to chafe against the narrative’s plans for her, and the fact that, for a Life player, the benefit and advancement resultant from her efforts being inevitably siphoned off to other characters is perilously difficult to tolerate. Roxy is the leader, not Jane, who is _supposed_ to be the leader. What Jane does for the group, she does for _Roxy’s_ group, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

And as an aside, I recommend you take a peek at any poll re: who’s the favorite alpha kid. It’s Roxy, I don’t even have to look. Who’s the least favorite? It’s…. well, it’s… even before the Epilogues, it’s Jane. What could be worse for a Life player, especially one for whom Life - status, advancement, material accomplishment, momentum - is inextricably intertwined with the self, as in all agents of aspect?

That said, on the rare occasion that the alpha unfavorite is not Jane, it’s Jake, which is a handy segue to Pages, who embody their aspect in a way that benefits the narrative at their direct expense.

I’ve already talked somewhat about Pages, our most narratively prominent examples being Jake and Tavros, of Hope and Breath respectively. There’s also plenty of Page-related mythos to resolve, here, as it’s one of the most discussed classes; Pages have such ‘potential’, the power of which is awe-inspiring but also punishingly difficult for a page to access of their own volition.

Jake’s relationship with Hope is tremendously elucidating, here. Jake has an affinity for fantasy and belief, his own and that of others, though this consistently works out poorly for him. He’s an easy person to believe things of, he inspires sentiment (and attachment, and attraction) seemingly without trying. He’s made of the stuff Hope is made of, which is to say, lies made real by sheer, stubborn conviction and repetition.

This doesn’t benefit him, and it certainly doesn’t benefit anyone else in his session or in the narrative. Instead, it hamstrings his ambitions and his ability to honestly self-assess and tangles his friends, the only people he cares about, into a muddle. The only thing Jake Jake-ing actually helps is the narrative progression of the alpha kids’ session and Homestuck as a whole; by serving as the conflict ball for the alphas, fomenting a web of confused, strung-along, contradictory beliefs, he serves the purposes of the void session and keeps anything constructive from happening, preventing anyone from actually dealing with their issues or their relationships, especially himself.

We can also see this bear out for Tavros; Breath being the aspect of disconnection from the bloody carcass of the past, tradition, and conventional ties in favor of the freedom to be found in new meaning, his relentless optimism and desire to transcend his physical body, even before his disabling injury, all speak of an inherent predisposition to his aspect comparable to Jake’s. His immersion in fantasy is far more sincere than Jake’s Hope-y artifice, too - he genuinely finds meaning in fantasy rather than ties to other trolls, not as means to an end, but as his true source of solace.

Tavros’s role within the confines of the beta trolls’ session is similar to Jake’s - he’s an object of conflict rather than a major actor in the session, which is fitting in more ways than one; it’s a Blood session, mired in the past and the tangles of relationships, precisely the thing Tavros is so determined to distance himself from. Blood and Breath are polar opposites. It stands to reason that his skillset wouldn’t be very appropriate to the session.

Jake and Tavros have painfully similar aspect-relationships, though with two very different aspects; they embody their aspect, and suffer/are instrumentalized in their own suffering for the high crime of doing so. The other major difference, here, and object of interest, is the question of Page-ly potential.

It’s my view that this textual element of canon offers profound support for the general schematic presented in this essay. Of course a Page would have ‘unchecked potential’; that’s literally how pages, like, the eponymous paper-sheets in books, or else pages on websites, work. You can… write anything on them. They’re a conduit between the author and the story.

A Page, as a class of character, is swept up in the tide of the story they inhabit. Their narrative positioning doesn’t serve their own interests, like the mutualist used-by class, the Heir. They aren’t bound to the service of others, like the commensalistic used-by class, the Maid. Their journey is one of being kicked to pieces by the narrative, their self-actualization undermined, their connections destabilized, severed, lost.

A blank Page is a powerful thing, especially in the hands of a Light player, doubly so an operant, a Sylph like Aranea, a seasoned aspect-user ready to exploit what the narrative has been rendering eminently exploitable through the obliteration of competing priorities and reasons for living.

God forbid, of course, the Page themself should ever learn to write.

**SUBHEADING: OPERANTS OF ASPECT (KNIGHTS, SYLPHS, PRINCES)**

Sweet fuck this is so long and I have been working on this for such a long time. Last one. Operants. Aspect users. What’s up with that? An operant of their aspect wields their aspect as it exists in the narrative like a tool. They use it. Exactly what it says on the tin. That doesn’t necessarily make an operant’s aspect relationship cold or perfunctory; a craftsperson may cherish their tools, and many a blade-user has been known to name their sword.

At the end of the day, though, the utility of an operant’s aspect to them is not in natural affinity, like an agent, nor in particular insight or transmutation, as with classes that fall on the changing axis. An operant instinctively uses their aspect in whatever form they find it, not bothering to invest their efforts in interrogation or transformation. What is, _is_ , and what matters is what they can do with it.

A Knight wields their aspect in a way that advances their position in the narrative. A Sylph wields their aspect in a way that advances the position of others in the narrative. A Prince wields their aspect to advance the narrative itself, at their own expense.

The interesting rote-word-level commonality between this trio is that all three are classic literary characters; the knight-errant, the guiding (meddling, even) spirit from the ether, and the… prince.

Let’s talk about Knights. Wielding their aspect to advance their narrative position. I mean, I’ve already talked a lot about Knights, but let’s talk some more about them. Karkat is a Knight and Dave is a Knight. Karkat wields the ties and allegiances of his friend group to steward them successfully through SGRUB; Dave wields the forces of fate and narrative progression to end Homestuck.

Knights, as well as knights, lowercase-k, are fairly classic, unambiguous protagonists. There’s a reason that Don Quixote’s call to a more beautiful, more black-and-white era of classicism, romanticism, and chivalry came in the form of knighthood. The knight is the good guy, whether a simple hardworking farm-lad seeking glory or a nobleman who takes up arms for a cause he believes in, who lives and dies by his own choices, his own sword and his own honor. Violence is the leveler for the knight. They may follow orders, but when it comes down to it, the knight wields the blade and makes the final judgement.

Dave and Karkat are… fairly unambiguously heroes, and are popularly viewed as such. They’re fairly uncomplicated good-guys, with healthy levels of respect of their aspect and few messy entanglements that they don’t manage to resolve. Their character arcs are linear and unambiguous. They start from positions of disadvantage, ‘overcome’ that disadvantage through their aspect, accomplish great things, and then ‘hang up the sword’.

Karkat is disadvantaged by his position within the hemospectrum, by his literal blood, but he overcomes the disadvantage through figurative blood - the cultivation of friendships and allegiances that give him meaning and a cause such that, by the end of Homestuck, absolutely no one gives a shit about his blood color.

Dave is disadvantaged by his rigidly and brutally enforced ‘destiny’, but he overcomes this disadvantage through… more destiny, but destiny on his own terms, meeting his fate, embracing it, understanding it, and walking away from it without a sense of loss or grief at the end of Homestuck, finding comfort in his ending.

Hell, even Latula, Knight of Mind, is disadvantaged - and much is made of her disadvantage - for her damaged senses and the manner in which this positions her in Beforan society. She overcomes this disadvantage by situating herself within a microcosm of society, wielding her social role and her perception (Mind) as a tool to accomplish this to her satisfaction. It’s a legitimate triumph for Latula that her main impact on fandom is that Game Girl song.

How about Sylphs, wielding their aspect to advance the narrative position of others? Kanaya and Aranea are two very useful Sylph points of reference. Sylphs are meddlers; it’s practically in the definition of the word, as it’s been used in literature as well as in terms of what ‘using aspect to advance others’ literally means.

Sylphs are all-knowing spirits of the ether that meddle in the human realm. Sylphs, rather than participating in the heroics and… villainics? of the miasma of humanity, instead, recurrently counsel and serve and advance the interests of a hero, a maiden, someone of sufficient intrigue to gain their allegiance.

Kanaya has what some could interpret as a recurring problem with this; she gravitates to situations in which, rather than acting herself, she effectively fixes someone else up and sets them down the path she judges to be the correct one. We see this with Vriska; we see this with Tavros; we see this with Eridan; we see this, most _successfully_ , with Karkat. She’s a Sylph of Space, and Space is an immensely powerful force. It’s Story Growth According To Plan. She intervenes, not only to set her chosen ‘heroes’ on the right course, but to correct the progression of the story itself. Eridan was not supposed to win. That was her narrative error to fix, and fix it she did.

It’s telling that the solace she eventually finds, the backbone-relationship of Homestuck, is with another commensalist who has been recurrently relegated to playing ‘support’ for a Knight. She and Rose are not the assigned heroes of Homestuck, but her relationship with Rose is a real victory, not for the narrative, but for the two women involved, finding fulfillment outside of their destiny.

Rosemary is what I’m talking about when I say that commensalists, like Seers and Sylphs, can achieve tremendous fulfillment and important personal victories without a narrative smackdown _or_ narrative support. Just not on center stage, and only after the narrative has extracted what it needs from them.

Aranea is a Light player - a Sylph of Light - and I said, earlier, that I’d talk about this, didn’t I? I assume you can guess why ‘narratively non-significant but personally meaningful’ victories as the ceiling for a Light player, especially a Light-wielding operant rather than a Light-informed student, would be devastating. A Sylph directs their Light-use for collective benefit. Aranea wants to fix the real story, for _everyone_ \- her ego is totally invested in her status as everyone’s savior, to the point of self-destruction. While Vriska’s egoism is inherent - she believes, through the power and insight invested in her through her relationship with Light, that the things she does are great and important - Aranea’s egoism is results-dependent and relatively inflexible.

If she doesn’t Fix The Whole Real Story, there’s no point. There’s no joy or fulfillment to be had in achieving a conclusion to her story in the dream bubbles - look at the difference in the way Vriska and Aranea deal with being sequestered in the dream bubbles as the universe collapses around them. Vriska finds a way to make herself the hero of this smaller, more personally important story, to get the girl and find her happy ending - Aranea is incapable of winning ‘for herself’. She schemes for millennia with the intentions of winning on the only terms that ‘count’ to her - empowering the _real_ heroes of the _real_ story and participating in the _real_ ending.

Light players are complicated, aren’t they. That’s a good segue, actually.

Princes are… _also_ complicated, but you already knew that. Even when they’re the good guy in literature, it’s not without ambiguity. Few classic folktales begin with a prince, unless it’s an evil one who needs to learn a lesson. Prince Hyacinth, who must accept that he is unattractive and has been lied to all his life; Prince Darling, who must accept his own cruelty and slowly be transformed into a righteous man through his sufferings. Stories with princes cast as the protagonist are really different than stories with knights in the same role. One with the absolute empowerment of royalty as a starting point has nowhere to go, narratively, but ‘down’.

We’ve got Dirk and Eridan as our example Princes. Princes begin their journey in a position of advantage - this holds true with Kurloz, our Backup Prince, as well. For all their loneliness and isolation and various forms of deprivation they inherit along with the legacy, they’re also empowered by it. Eridan and Kurloz sit directly at the top of the hemospectrum, though with plenty of negligent/shitty parent issues to accompany them; Dirk similarly inherits a place of advantage from his notable but absentee father. Princes enter the medium with preexisting powersets and high expectations to accompany them.

Then they get kicked to hell and back. While the Knight’s journey through their aspect use is a constructive one - through their aspect, they heal and grow - for Princes, the reverse is true. Eridan’s aspect costs him Feferi and ultimately his life. Hope is useful to him - he accomplishes things through it that no one else could, and racks up a body count higher than Gamzee’s in the process - but it’s a double-edged kind of use that comes at devastating and disproportionate cost. Eridan’s use of Hope is self-defeating. The more he uses his Belief, the less he has to believe in. He destroys the very things he desires with the manifestation of that desire. Hope bleeds him dry.

Dirk’s aspect costs him his self. Like Eridan, he successfully weaponizes his aspect, and enters the medium with abilities disproportionate to the rest of his team. Also like Eridan, his journey is a downhill one, of using his aspect - his identity, as a badass take-no-shit swordguy and master planner - in a way that erodes his identity and ultimately costs him the ability to relate to the people he loves on a human level. He destroys his personal meaning through personal meaning-making. Heart bleeds him dry.

For all this self-defeating, Princes are a pivotal element of the narrative. They incite conflict. A story needs conflict. Without the Princes of Homestuck crashing and burning the way they do, Homestuck couldn’t happen. They play an important part, but what a painful part to play.

**PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER: SO WHAT DOES A CLASSPECT ‘MEAN’?**

TL;DR: a flowchart.

This has been a longass essay, largely because, in contrast with the aspect essay, I’m kind of trying to evidentiate two systems at once: Skaian Symbiosis and Changing-Using.

All of this systematizing is completely useless if it can’t be… used. So let’s talk about what, through this understanding, a classpect ‘means’ for a character.

In Homestuck, that use is multi-faceted. On one level, Skaia exists within the text as a static entity within a work of literature now that Homestuck is complete. It’s a closed system that we can attempt to reverse-engineer, which is essentially what I’ve done in this essay, or tried to do: I’ve _tried_ to reverse-engineer this systemic element of Homestuck itself, which is something you can do, when a corpse washes up on the beach after you’ve watched it swim around and observed it doing creature-things for a decade or so. You can dissect it and poke at it and make pretty good observations about how it works, especially when you have a log of its behavior when it was alive.

At the same time, Homestuck was written by a guy, over the course of many years. It’s not a spontaneously generated work passed down from God written on stone tablets all at once. As much as Homestuck’s mechanics can be looked at as a cohesive in-game system, they also can and should be understood to be a flexible system that helped a guy write a really excellent work of improvisational storytelling.

Understanding classpect is a small but important part of understanding Homestuck, specifically because Classpect Isn’t All-Determining, and isn’t a static system from which Homestuck grows. It’s a storytelling device.

Classpect is fundamentally a very useful system, because a succinct description of a character - what motivates them, what position they occupy in a story - helps to tell a constantly evolving story with a consistent point of reference. Knowing that a character is a Knight of Mind tells you something about that character even before you know anything else about them; you can build a character out of classpect.

I wasn’t in the room when Andrew Hussie wrote Homestuck. But I really believe that the guiding star of Homestuck is as much its characters as the brilliant symbolic shorthand it uses to describe them and situate them in the world they inhabit.

So, the question I get asked most often on this subject is: does Skaia make these characters this way, like, am I contending that there is some internal mechanism of Skaia that Makes the character fit these roles? Or am I saying that every character, ever, just happens to fit most conveniently into one of one hundred and forty-four permutations of classpect, and Skaia just deals with what it’s given?

Is Skaia a Character Determining Engine, or is Skaia’s function incidental to predetermined characters?

To these questions, I say: Skaia is make-believe. Andrew Hussie uses the Skaian organism, and all of the accompanying constructs, to tell a story. That story is called Homestuck. An author is a character-determining engine; Skaia is one of the many internal means by which a story can be organized and told.

Classpect is a really useful system. A lot of really culturally impactful stories introduce a symbolic vocabulary flexible enough to be used to describe things other than the source material. The Hunger Games gives us twelve districts, each with associations that distinguish, say, ‘District 2’ from ‘District 12’. Harry Potter gives us the houses and the sorting hat.

Did the sorting hat put Harry Potter into Gryffindor, or did the author? Hint: the sorting hat is not real, but the author of Harry Potter, unfortunately, is.

I guess that’s a bit of a cop-out, though, in terms of how I ‘think’ Skaia works. Perhaps obviously, I think that the answer is more complicated than ‘Skaia generates the players to fulfil certain roles’ vs ‘Skaia has nothing to do with this at all and is just a game engine, the course of the game being entirely determined by the players’.

In-universe, the players are people before they enter Skaia, and Skaia acts on them in certain ways depending on the way they are when they enter the game. I do think that any character can be ‘classpected’ by this system, and that any character that entered the medium would be ‘classpected’ when they did so, but that this would be somewhat flexible depending on the dynamics of the session. Class is a highly reflexive system. The characters are aware of it. Their awareness shapes its implications.

A Bard of Space and a Maid of Hope both look pretty similar in the dark. The same person could be said to be changed, to their detriment, by the imposition of an organized-growth/creation narrative and also to furnish advancement to others through their embodiment of irrepressible counter-narrative growth and creation. It all depends on which element of their story the author, using the narrative, focuses the lens of the story on. Does it dwell on the direction their suffering takes the narrative, or does it mostly sideline them in terms of their heroics or villainy in favor of their impact on other characters in the story?

On top of all that - you would react differently to being ‘classpected’ as a Bard of Space as opposed to a Maid of Hope, wouldn’t you? Names have power, and Homestuck, as a story, doesn’t shy away from this truism.

This kind of analysis, in my view, works best if we think of Skaia as effectively a character in the author’s arsenal, constantly in flux with the other characters and story objectives. Its objectives compete with those of the players. It may not be strictly sentient, but neither is the white whale in Moby Dick, and that worked out pretty fucking well for Herman Melville.

Internal rules _help_ , but the exactitudes of these systems, like the minutiae of characters, develop as the story progresses, expands, self-references and reincorporates its own text. Once it’s concluded, it is what the text supports it being, but while in the process of writing and developing a story, systems within improvisational literature need ambiguity and room to breathe in a way that a rote ‘video game mechanic’ simply doesn’t.

This is the major issue I take with ‘overengineering’, whether by Calliope in-story or by other fans outside-of-story. It diminishes the utility of the system in writing a serial story like Homestuck that has a backbone of a plot, but in which the muscle, sinew, and skin of the updates, the things that change most responsively and readily to the author’s day-to-day growth, development as a writer, interactions with fandom, and interactions with other media, are flexible enough to breathe with an author (and a WORLD) that ages nearly a decade over the process of writing Homestuck!

It just works better, provides more fodder and maneuverability, when the meaning is flexible and can be nimbly applied to changing circumstances. When ‘Thief of Light’ is a Thief of Light, yes, but doesn’t that remind you of ‘stealing spotlight’, when you hear about it? Isn’t that an association you could riff off of?

The meaning is ultimately in the reincorporation. Homestuck sets up a lot of beats that it never reincorporates. Hussie, outside of the text, says things about class that he goes on to contradict. But the entire system is _there_ in the text, and you can use it and reincorporate it as well, in familiar as well as novel ways.

Writing your fanventure, classpecting your fantroll, penning your own observational reading - or writing something completely different! Classpecting is, and I say this with great gravity and utter sincerity, the best-developed and most thorough shorthand for situating characters in narrative. It is the _best one that exists_. If you’re reading this essay, it’s also one that’s relatively intuitive to you, by now.

The best system to guide your writing is the one that works. The one that helps you write, that helps you ideate, that helps you understand.

I’m not against self-classpecting. It would be kind of a silly thing to be against, since I don’t think it’s hurting anyone. Your life is a story that you write. There’s no harm in living it deliberately. The best system to guide your _living_ is the one that works.

Rather than fixating on the limits of classpect, as some have - I understand that Andrew Hussie, at one point, contended that certain classes are inherently gendered, which is nonsense that even he no longer seems to believe, yet no one on Twitter will let me forget this - or heaven forbid, creating arbitrary new ones out of extratextual speculation, I urge you to look for the elements of the system that are useful to you in your own reading and writing. Be ruthless. Gnaw the carcass bare.

The corpse of Homestuck waits, beached, simmering in the sun. It’s done. It’s dead. Its body, the text, is yours for the taking.

What will you do?

**Author's Note:**

> To discuss this or anything with me, I can be contacted on Twitter as [@0pacifica](https://twitter.com/0pacifica), or via a newly created Tumblr, also as [0pacifica](https://0pacifica.tumblr.com/). Enormous thanks are owed to Juli [@DEATHMETALJOCK](https://twitter.com/DEATHMETALJOCK), Sofi [@aslanZounder](https://twitter.com/aslanZounder), and Julia [@headlessJulie](https://twitter.com/headlessJulie). 
> 
> For your thoughts, your editing, and your support, and I owe you my life. Anything particularly coherent is owed to my friends and editors, and the responsibility for anything ridiculous is entirely my own.


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